Bananalike fruit / MON 11-26-12 / Funny Martha of old TV / Wahine's greeting / Obsolescent directories / Floor machine

Constructor: Ed Sessa

Relative difficulty: Medium (-Challenging? is À VOTRE SANTÉ gonna hold some folks back ...?)

THEME: Bready breakfast — clues are breakfast foods made with flour and eggs; answers are have nothing to do with breakfast

• 20A: Pancakes (FLATTENS OUT)
• 41A: Waffles (BLOWS HOT AND COLD)
• 59A: French toast (À VOTRE SANTÉ)

Word of the Day: PAPAW (64A: Bananalike fruit) —

Both the papaya and the papaw are sometimes referred to as pawpaw, which is thoroughly confusing because they're entirely different fruits. The papaw is a North American native that's a member of the cherimoya family. It can range from 2 to 6 inches long and looks like a fat, dark-brown banana. The aromatic flesh is pale yellow and peppered with a profusion of seeds. It has a custardlike texture and a sweet flavor reminiscent of bananas and pears. Papaws are seldom cultivated and are rarely found in markets. (Barron's Food Lover's Companion)

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/pawpaw#ixzz2DHOhnZx2

• • •

My wife and I solved this together, with me calling out clues to her while she went about the business of baking my birthday cake. It was interesting to see how many answer she could get with seeing the grid or even knowing how many letters were in each answer, though she did think 1A: Dull-colored was DUN. Me: "I said *four* letters." Her: "DUN *is* four letters: D, U, N [puzzled look, laughter]." This theme is very cute, but I like it primarily for the host of interesting long Down answers. So many easy / high word-count puzzles lack  longer non-theme answers, which leads to excessive dullness (or DUN-ness, or DUNN-ness). But here, we get fantastic stuff like IDLE RICH, TWO-TIMED, SCALAWAG (this is starting to feel like a short story), SECOND-RATE PHONE BOOKS and NONSENSE. Lovely.

Wife's commentary on solving the puzzle without the grid in front of her: "It's weird when you don't actually sit down and look at it. It's weird how my brain works ... if you read me off a phone number, I'm lost. Are you writing down what I'm saying?..."

I always hear SCAL*I*WAG, or maybe I'm thinking of POLLIWOG. I knew PAPAW right away (had the "W") but wife did Not like the "bananalike" part of the clue, mainly due to the "pawpaw" confusion described in the PAPAW definition posted above ("pawpaw" is used to refer to two different fruits—papaya and papaw). We both wanted RUNS HOT AND COLD and had to wait on the crosses to figure out BLOWS. We both blanked on the [Algerian port]—you'd think I'd have that sorted out by now, but my brain went "well, it's not OMAN, so it must be ADEN." Wrong (it's ORAN). Best wrong answer came from my wife in response to 73A: Distinctive Marilyn Monroe feature. Me: "Starts with 'M'..." Wife: "Mmm.... MOUE?"

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld